I bid my soul through the flames before me; mesec

[breach]

for so long had my teeth held my tongue from a venomous voice
but the poison has passed from my lips to my hands, an incendiary point

Breach never had any intention of being a model prisoner.

She had no intention of serving her time quietly—counting the days until she was deemed able to travel back to her home, her kingdom, and her pack. Certainly and especially not once she learned the true identity of who had done the stealing. The fact that she was now held hostage in her mother’s old home—the place where Sochi had been ripped apart by personal betrayal—did nothing to soften her.

As she walks through Loess, she shifts fluidly, once again wearing her mother’s tigress body. Once upon a time, it had been a familiar sight on these borders—patrolling the land constantly. Now, her mother lay comatose in the corner of Hyaline with her father wasting away by her side.

The thought causes her mind to nearly snap, severing in two, and she snarls as she leaps forward, bounding through the fairly empty kingdom. It takes everything within her to rein in the aggression, to hear her mother’s voice as she was being taught the art of the hunt. She wants to lay waste to the kingdom but instead she stalks quietly. She observes with a twisting in her belly, an aching in her bones.

Until she sees the silvery stallion on his own.

Then, all thoughts of decency flood from her—and nothing but the pent up aggression remains.

(Was this, perhaps, what Ghaul saw in her? Was this why he named her his heir?)

She thinks about attacking blindly. Thinks about leaping onto his back and sinking her teeth into his flesh. Thinks about shaking him like a rag doll into all of his bones break and he falls limp.

But she wants to see the look in his eyes.

And she wants him to carry the message she has for his fellow kingdom mates.

So she approaches him dead-on, her eyes hard and cold.

“Do you live here?”

If only he could know why she asks.

though ritual pyre sending smoke to the sky as the building continues to burn
though rapt in the ruin, the pain in the grave, is lies you leave tied to the earth